


Well, I come from an even newer country.

by lyryk (s_k)



Category: English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-17
Updated: 2011-01-17
Packaged: 2017-10-14 20:24:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/153123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/s_k/pseuds/lyryk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wonders how far Lahore is from Hiroshima, what little red lines connect the two cities in the map of his memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Well, I come from an even newer country.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mazily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mazily/gifts), [metonomia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonomia/gifts).



> **Warning** : Reference to miscarriage.  
>  **A/N** : Title from Hana’s diary: _He says Lahore is an ancient city. London is a recent town compared with Lahore. I say, Well, I come from an even newer country._ This is a gift for [mazily](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mazily) and [metonomia](http://archiveofourown.org/users/metonomia); please consider this a late Yuletide treat!

She has learnt that one can say ‘I love you’ and not mean ‘I’ll love you forever’, and that that’s okay. It’s okay, really, but it’s not the sort of thing one should know at twenty.

At twenty, one should not know what it’s like to have a dead unborn child that one can talk to. Sometimes she inadvertently talks aloud, and doesn’t realise it until Kip gives her a look. It isn’t compassion or pity, but an almost indifferent sort of understanding that seems to silently acknowledge what she can’t: that the connection they have found exists merely because of the war, that anything born out of something terrible is suspect. That her child was never meant to be.

Kip is beautiful. Kip, with his waist-length hair and his sensual hands that defuse bombs, that save lives in a time of war. At times he steals her breath with his sheer physicality, at times when he talks about straddling live bombs in dark places, at times when he pours water over his dark, heavy hair to rinse the last of the military-issue soap from it. She cannot help but be aware of the strength of his arms, the darkness that lingers in a turn of his phrase, crinkling like a toffee wrapper around a hint of a faraway culture that she will never know. Physical, sensual. Too much. Not enough.

‘Bombs and imagination are not a good combination,’ he tells her before he leaves the villa, leaves _her_. She tries to kickstart her own imagination as the engine of his motorcycle roars to life, tries to read his mind and see the destruction in Japan through the eyes of someone who knows bombs just as well as he has come to know her body. She wishes then that she had known that their last time together would be their _last_ , that she’d spent more time mapping his skin with her palms and her mouth. He leaves her with a last memory, an image from his imagination: the description of an artificial cloud mushrooming over a city where the streets are on fire. She wonders how far Lahore is from Hiroshima, what little red lines connect the two cities in the map of his memories.

She watches his motorcycle turn the corner. In her mind he will always ride, always remain young and determined, always be seeking his way back to Asia. While the sound of his motorcycle is still in her ears, she walks back into the ruined villa, into the broken library with the missing wall that lets the rain in. She pulls an atlas from a shelf and sits cross-legged amid the rubble, turning to a map of the world, its sections separated like orange peels. She finds Toronto on the map, folds the page so that it touches Lahore, linking her hometown with Kip’s, and closes the book carefully, leaving the little black dots of the two cities pressed against each other. She leans back against the shelf and imagines him riding, riding through the lines on the map to reach Asia, and lets herself believe that she will be able to feel the heat and smell the smoke of the burning streets when he gets there, that his grief will find her in a crumbling villa in Italy and follow her home to Canada.


End file.
